The energy of dislike

As a creator it is your privilege to privately create whatsoever you wish about whomsoever you choose. If you write, you can write bad things happening to bad people. And in doing so, know you are in fine company.

Lucian of Samosata wrote satire, his work often targeting public figures. In the quote below, taken from The Passing of Peregrinus, Lucian recounts his version of the life and death of the cynic Peregrinus Proteus (100-165CE). Lucian witnessed the suicide of Peregrinus when he set fire to himself at the 165CE Olympics.

“Thereafter he went away a third time, to Egypt, to visit Agathobulus, where he took that wonderful course of training in asceticism, shaving one half of his head, daubing his face with mud, and demonstrating what they call ‘indifference’ by erecting his yard amid a thronging mob of bystanders, besides giving and, taking blows on the back-sides with a stalk of fennel, and playing the mountebank even more audaciously in many other ways.”

If you feel blocked in your work take these words as permission to privately create all the things you think you ought not.

Create your foe in the town square with a shaved head and dirty face. Write them ‘erecting their yard’ in public. Show them taking blows from vegetables. Expose them as the fraud you know them to be.

Rebel. Be bold.